Just played a game. Impressions in vrac:<p>- The website is very... monochrome. Seems like a very basic theme. The UI is not adapted to a desktop (vertical, hidden menu), I haven't visited the website on mobile. I wouldn't expect that from a game website.<p>- The rules need images!<p>- It's missing a rules button in the game interface that doesn't change page, but opens a popup or something similar.<p>- More colors!<p>- There's scrolling in the play area, remove them.<p>- Without the direct link for a game found in the HN comments, I would never have gotten to even play a game. It seems there's no way to create a game as a guest. I hate registering on websites, if you ask me to register before I even can see what the game looks like, I won't.<p>- Is there a chat? I might have missed it. It seems like an important feature if your goal is to have far away friends play together.<p>- Games? I see only one, and nowhere I can find mention of others in work.<p>About the pricing:<p>- For the free tier, I don't understand what you mean by "Freely given to all users; limit one."<p>- Subjectively, I dislike the "pay what you want". It's like tipping, I don't like feeling cheap by tipping too little, I don't like feeling like I'm wasting money tipping too much. Either way, I will feel bad.<p>- The pay for 10/20 games is... surprising. Seeing how fast the games are (2 minutes per game!), the minimum price of $2 for 10 games is <i>exorbitant</i>. Specially for something that seems in alpha. I want a monthly subscription, not a "pay for X number of games".<p>- And most of all... this is very, very early access. There's only one very basic game. There's many free online multiplayers games out there, more complexe and polished. What do you do (will do) to differentiate from them?<p>- The game itself is fun.
Couldn't find any information about the games available to play (there's only one page for rules, so it appears only one game is available). Couldn't create a game after creating an account. It's not clear that this site is even at the MVP stage?<p>Bounced off this hard.
I couldn't find any information about what games I can play or host. Why would I sign up for a mystery product? Please focus your landing pages on the service you provide.
I’ve organised a few social events for work, family and friends using services like these so this is something that does very much appeal to me. So there’s definitely a market for this kind of stuff but it’s also quite a competitive market. To that end, I don’t think your landing page does a good enough job of selling your product. You sell your company name, introduce me to your team, all of which I’m sure is important to you, but all I’d be interested in is which games you’ve got, how much fun they are to play and how I can play them remotely with friends.<p>The latter point appears easy enough when looking at the join options. But none of this is addressed on the landing page. You don’t even appear to have any pictures of the games anywhere on your site (maybe you do once you’ve signed up? But how many people are going to sign up blind?)<p>I really do like your mission statement but bare in mind that sometimes “gaudy” designs are picked because they look more “fun”. The site design currently doesn’t project “fun” to me. It looks more like a business page. I’m not suggesting you need to make the site gimmicky but take a look at the way how other games are marketed. This might intentionally be trying to buck the trend but that will likely cost you more customers than it attracts.<p>Also the pricing is a little confusing. I think you might be better off with fewer price points but define them more clearly. A little bit of the confusion I had was also because without seeing what content you had on your portal (or even what the portal looks like) it’s hard to understand what you’re paying for.<p>I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this and seeing how it progresses because, as I said, I do organise a lot of events so always on the look out for new ways to entertain groups.
Trying again since my earlier post didn't get much traction :-)<p>Hey HN!<p>I’m Alex Scheel, co-founder of Willow Patch Games (<a href="https://willowpatchgames.com#about" rel="nofollow">https://willowpatchgames.com#about</a>).<p>We’re creating online games that are fun to play with friends and families unable to meet in person during these times. Unlike most other competitors in this space, we’re looking to keep things simple: we’d like to bootstrap the company, we won’t sell user data for advertisements, and we’ll avoid gaudy graphics that require the latest phone as much as possible. We’re trying to be good stewards and provide quality games rather than being just another race-to-the-bottom game company. We’re trying to be as friendly to join and play as possible: joining someone’s game will always be free.<p>I started this project in August with my brother, Nick, our other co-founder. We’re still in the early stages, but very curious to hear feedback about what we’ve built so far. We have lots of ideas and plans for the future but figured we might as well see what HN has to say! At least for us, we've had a lot of fun playing this under our states' quarantines. We've recruited several friends and family members to help beta test and it has been a blast reconnecting with everyone.<p>Some cool things we have brewing are:<p>- Video and text chat integration<p>- Other types of games, including some of our favorite card games<p>- Improving the experience on older devices<p>- Building mobile apps<p>- Alternative dictionary support<p>Feel free to email us at willowpatchgames@gmail.com if you have any questions.<p>Let us know what you think and may the odds be ever in your favor!
Shameless plug. I've got my own little online multiplayer game I made for fun I'm pleased with. <a href="https://yatzyonline.azurewebsites.net/" rel="nofollow">https://yatzyonline.azurewebsites.net/</a><p>At the start of lockdown I was inspired to make my own version of Yatzy (Yhatzee?) to play with friends. We tried to find somewhere to play Yatzy together and all the versions we found were full of social media signups and micro-transaction.<p>We wanted something simple to jump in and play in the browser. The <a href="https://www.horsepaste.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.horsepaste.com</a> copy of CodeNames is a really good example of this done well.<p>It took a couple of days to make. There's some bad development practices in there. Like heavy use of polling (I've since learned about WebSockets). And I wish I hadn't made the frontend in JQuery. But I'm quite pleased with result. Its had a few hundred successful games finished through it and I learned a lot. Once I sort some of the awful code messes I'll open source it.<p>Anyways if anyone's interested its very easy to jump in and start a game.<p><a href="https://yatzyonline.azurewebsites.net/" rel="nofollow">https://yatzyonline.azurewebsites.net/</a>
This is cool! I've been using something similar called Backyard (<a href="https://backyard.co/" rel="nofollow">https://backyard.co/</a>) for game nights with friends - they've got video, voice and text chat with a whole host of games all in one place. I think your site would benefit from some of the same design decisions they've made like showing a snapshot of a game and available titles on the homepage. Also, my squad loves the backyard whiteboard since we can use it for student group projects and stuff when we're not trying to play
It could be because of my browser settings / extensions, but I couldn't find any information about the games you can play on the site. It looks like you have to have a paid account to see the list of available games. From a guest account the "Play a Game" page is blank. I would suggest making the games themselves more front and center, as right now the site almost feels like a business-to-business site telling me more about the company itself than the products.
Another shameless plug, my girlfriend and I created an online multiplayer game during the first lockdown. The game was inspired by an instagram filter that was trending at the time. We've had over 12k unique users so far.<p><a href="https://gibberishgame.com" rel="nofollow">https://gibberishgame.com</a><p>The game was made in unity. The service used for the multiplayer portion is called photon.
Wish there were pictures easily found on the main landing page of the game.<p>I tried to try it out but didn’t get admitted into a room.<p>There’s only text in the rules, so it’s hard for me to know what type of game this is.<p>I think investing in some better UI would be great :)<p>Good job shipping something! Just a little too much friction IMO
Also as a shameless plug since I never made it to the first page either :)
Would love some feedback on real-time video enabled multiplayer gaming <a href="https://multiplayer.app/" rel="nofollow">https://multiplayer.app/</a><p>Only Jigsaw works right now.
I tried to play, even joined my own game as a guest via incognito mode - but couldn't start the game. I set # of players to 2 but every time I clicked start it said the game was configured to have 0 players which is invalid.
It certainly needs more help with explaining the game. I used the link below to join but could not figure out how to play. What do the buttons on the grid page do? Might be helpful to post some info.
Sorry folks, I've gotta make dinner. I'll be back in an hour or so to play some more. If anyone's interested, email me at willowpatchgames@gmail.com :-)